For us to even have a hope of having a proper RW, he needs to be left footed for me. That is how bad I see things
That is simple logic IMO. A top RW either needs to naturally left-footed to come inside and have the game on their stronger foot, or athletic enough to excel going on the outside. The average PL full back is pretty athletic themselves, so if you want to go on the outside, you need to be fast and strong enough. This is the reason why coaches have had the bright idea to play Mata on the right but never on the left. Common sense would tell you he has no chance of being a functioning left winger wt the highest level, just as much as common sense would have told you that he could ‘probably do a job on the right’. Just as Jack Grealish can play left wing, or people are now adding Pogba to the list of options we have to play left. But not right, for obvious reasons.
My position last summer was that this signing didn’t make much sense. For a number of reasons. It demonstrated poor planning to me. Greenwood was 19, Amad was 19 and Sancho was 21. All here to ‘develop on the right wing’. Sancho seemed more a vanity purchase - he definitely fit the profile of a ‘United player’, but the actual United football team didn’t look like they had much need.
For me, we’d have been better off at least having a good look at Amad and developing him in rotation with Greenwood. We can dismissively say ‘Amad isn’t ready’, but people say that acting as if that is some sort of permanent state! He was 19. Perhaps by 21 he’d be ‘ready’, and everything in between would of course be a sliding scale of him gradually getting closer to being ready, the more football he played. The fact is - Sancho is 21 and clearly not ready either. I don’t doubt that he will be, at some point, perhaps in a year or so - but if he himself needed development for a year plus before he could really contribute, why not just give that time to the one you bought 6 months earlier? The one who has the added advantage of clearly being a natural fecking right winger too!
I’m sure Amad could have scored two goals and had no assists so far this season with the same minutes. And if he did, I imagine he’d have more by this time next season, just as we’d expect Sancho too. I don’t see him as left gifted than Sancho, so if it is a simple question of which talent is worth developing more, I’d have just gone with him, and bought Declan Rice with the money instead. And again, long term, he’s also a more natural fit for the position at hand. There has been mo such debate about left or right with him. We know that he belongs on the right. When he plays for his country, he’s on the right. When he plays for the 23s, he’s on the right. I’m not one of those who goes on about ‘how to run a football club’, but this micro example demonstrates poor planning and logic to me.